It's been a week since Ilyas Shurpaev's death. There are 720 messages on his Odnoklassniki.ru page now. And 241 on his last blog post. Rest in peace, Ilyas. That's what most of them say, more or less.
Channel 1, for which he worked, is a shithole. After watching part of their Sunday newscast, a dear friend made a comment that totally broke my heart: their coverage is so outrageous, so full of crap, and because of that, Shurpaev deserves no pity. Something along those lines.
There's a number of nasty comments on Shurpaev's blog, too, but it's easy to ignore them. Most seem to deal with the fact that he was Muslim and non-Russian.
But when someone you know well and love a lot switches into that ruthless LJ mode when talking to you in person - knowing full well how you feel - it does hurt.
And Shurpaev, someone I've never met and read only occasionally, felt like a friend.
Internet is such a strange place.
***
I really regret having never commented on any of Shurpaev's posts.
And I still can't forgive myself for not smiling to papa when I saw him for the last time in my life.
It's so easy, to leave a comment and to smile, isn't it.
***
On the day Shurpaev was killed, I explained to Marta that I was feeling very sad - and, can you believe it, she looked at me as if she understood and told me that she loved me. And later, when I cried watching a news report about him, she told me she adored me.
We love you too!
ReplyDeleteAnd your dad knew you loved him too.
ReplyDeleteyour children do understand how you feel, and because you've consoled her many times, she knows how to help you out in her own way. In the same way, one moment doesn't undo all the affection you've shown your dad over the years.
ReplyDeleteOn a sadder note, life is just way way too stressful for journalists in Russia. I feel badly for all of them and almost wish the government would just do away with the whole profession. Just put it out of its misery, so to speak.
Afisha would get special dispensation to survive, konechno.
Julia
Oh, I know what you mean about the internet somehow enabling people to be harsher and more cruel than they would be in person...but then it spills over into the in-person. On the other hand, it allows us to meet, in a way, people that we wouldn't have otherwise, or might have but hadn't yet.
ReplyDeleteFrom Peru, lots of love for you!
ReplyDeleteI kept thinking about your story. I suspect another reason it's so upsetting to be confronted with that kind of harsh rhetoric in real life from someone you love is that it's just the sort of dehumanizing either-or, black-white rhetoric that's used by the government (and its media outlets) to justify all kinds of horrible policies that devalue individual human lives. We all become infected by it.
ReplyDeleteOur children intuit so much. . . and feel our joys and sadness with us.
ReplyDelete